Hi, After studying windowing systems, widget toolkits, and X for years, i concluded the only way i can write decent CAD applications that work well across networks is to abandon X and write my own networked windowing system and widget toolkit (both of which partially work currently in a slow simulated environment). I would run X apps in rootless server mode to maintain compatability.
The problem is that i need complete control over the graphics card, but all the current ones are proprietory and undocumented. I've looked at all the X driver code, but there's too much obscure card-specific hardware stuff to figure out. I'll make an X driver for an OGD if it's working yet and i can get one (i can't see from the wiki or the mail archives that anyone is doing an X driver). A main thing i'm interested in is a hardware accelerated 2D baseline API so that a decent windowing system and fast widget set can be ported to any low-end hardware such as 4MB video cards, yet still look good (eg, have a 3D look) and run fast with low bloat. OpenGL and video would be supported as an optional modular extension. Therefore, i don't require any 3D openGL stuff, and would be happy with just a dumb frame buffer i can fully control. Eventually, i'd make hardware that composites horizontal spans of pixels according to simple instructions held in a command fifo on the graphics card, plus some other higher level stuff. I've read all the X and kernel DRI stuff, but it'll take me more effort to fully understand the details and how mesa uses it. If i figure out how the DRI stuff works, i'll try making an X driver for it as time permits. I'm not into HDL atm, but did VHDL for a year in Xilinx webpack (Spartan2 devices), and Altera quartus. I hate VHDL. I'll learn Verilog next time. I design everything analog, high-freq RF, a bit of DSP (Analog Devices), and microcontrollers (AVR mainly). I'm familiar with kernel code and writing device drivers to some degree. I've also written simple graphics compilers and have written LL(1) and LALR(1) parser-generator tools. -- Russell Shaw, B.Eng, M.Eng(Research) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
